kottke.org posts about Jon Hendren

Most tweetstorms are perfectly harmless, some are downright satisfying, and only a few make us seriously consider gouging out our own eyes. But — how shall I put this? — there is a reason most of them were not written in a form that encourages long preservation of the entire thing. Even the better Twitter threads are very much of the moment. They were not built to last. Nor should they have been.

Luckily, there are exceptions. Here are some of the tweetstorms/multiperson twitter threads that Kottke readers voted to include on the World Wide Web’s space ark.

Please Stop Roasting My Goddamned Shoes. Comedian Jon Hendren found a pair of red Vans with a leopard print lining in the back of his closet. Did his fellow comedian friends let this pass without comment? No, they most certainly did not.

“A Wild Weekend In Florida,” or “Zola’s Story,” by Aziah King It’s never been entirely clear exactly how much of any of this really happened, but the microserialized true-crime story was and is a bona fide phenomenon. “A Wild Weekend” also uses breaks between tweets better than any Twitter story I’ve ever read — most tweets are perfectly self-contained, but a few of them are used to build suspense or cut from one moment to the next to great effect.

HLN (which used to be CNN Headline News) needed someone to talk about Edward Snowden, US government whistleblower. They meant to invite a gentleman named John Hendren, a journalist for Al Jazeera, onto the show but instead invited funnyman Jon Hendren, who goes by the username of @fart on Twitter. Hendren, Jon used the opportunity to defend both Edward Snowden, briefly, and then sexy-but-misunderstood barber Edward Scissorhands.

Well, you know, to say he couldn’t harm someone, well, absolutely he could. But I think to cast him out, to make him invalid in society, simply because he has scissors for hands, I mean, that’s strange. People didn’t get scared until he started sculpting shrubs into dinosaur shapes and whatnot.

The best part is that anchor Yasmin Vossoughian just keeps on plowing right through her script like they’re not talking suddenly about a man with scissors for hands, deftly demonstrating what a farce these TV news “conversations” are. (via nymag)